00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page i RECORD AND FILM PRODUCER JOE BOYD was born in Boston in 1942 and graduated from Harvard in 1964. He went on to produce Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, REM and many others. He produced the documentary Jimi Hendrix and the film Scandal . In 1980 he started Hannibal Records and ran it for 20 years. Joe Boyd lives in London. His podcast, ‘Joe Boyd’s A-Z’, and links to his talks and radio shows can be found at www.joeboyd.co.uk. He is currently working on a book about ‘world music’. White Bicycles received the 2007 Deems Taylor ‘Music Book of the Year’ award and has been published in seven foreign- language editions. praise for White Bicycles ‘As a memoir of the enchanted ’60s, White Bicycles is among the elite. It isn’t just that Boyd was among the era’s movers and shakers, he has a rare recall of events… and a fluid, engaging style. The book bristles with evocative anecdotes… exhilarating’ Observer Music Monthly ‘One of the most lucid and insightful music autobiographies I’ve read’ Michel Faber, Guardian ‘Terrific… This engaging and readable book is an important addition to the history of its time’ Hanif Kureishi, New Statesman ‘A rock memoir that shuns the usual ’60s clichés… while providing insightful character studies of Brit-folk’s future stars… refreshing and cleverly observed’ Uncut ‘Among the musical anecdotes are thoughtful observations on the era… Boyd remains a true believer, for whom it was a joy to have been alive in that permissive dawn. At 40 years’ distance, his prose still conveys the hues of the sunrise with startling vividness’ Nigel Williamson, The Times ‘Impossible to put down’ Q 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page ii ‘Boyd is one of that select group of rock luminaries, like John Peel, or the American producer Rick Rubin, who didn’t have to pick up a guitar to shape the evolution of entire genres of music. And this book is the perfect literary echo of a lifetime’s subtle facilitation… Boyd’s pages abound with astute observations and fascinating personal detail… a transport of delight’ Independent on Sunday ‘A vivid eye-witness account… pulses with the mad enthusiasms of its period and its author’ Robert Sandall, Sunday Times ‘Boyd’s account far exceeds the breadth of most rose-tinted ruminations… detailed and lucid… A wise, thoughtful and engrossing account, White Bicycles is one of the best 1960s essays of recent years’ Scotsman ‘Boyd writes in a dry, assured style about remarkable times, and he achieves the goal of any music book: to make the reader want to check out the music he writes about’ Will Hodgkinson, Guardian Guide ‘Reading Boyd’s cracking account of the Sixties, you wonder if his life since hasn’t been one long disappointment… It’s a colourful story, beautifully told… You are left relieved that such a central figure wrote this exceptional memoir’ Mark Ellen, Observer ‘A fascinating book overflowing with entertaining and insightful musical anecdotes’ Morning Star ‘Compulsive quirky detail, rare sanity and razor sharp recall… puts it in the same bracket as Simon Napier Bell’s Black Vinyl White Powder or Julian Cope’s Head On . A delight’ The List ‘Packed full of funny, telling anecdotes and wry, insightful observation, it takes us on a fantastic musical adventure’ fRoots 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page iii Joe Boyd White Bicycles MAKING MUSIC IN THE 1960s With a new foreword by Hanif Kureishi 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page iv A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request The right of Joe Boyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Copyright © 2006 Joe Boyd Foreword copyright © 2017 Hanif Kureishi First published in 2006 by Serpent’s Tail First published in this Classics edition in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3 Holford Yard Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD www.serpentstail.com The cover photograph was taken at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by Jim Floyd and includes Joe Boyd (hat), Tom Rush, Geoff and Maria Muldaur, and Eric Anderson (back of head above Maria). The candy-stripe script is from the first UFO poster in January of 1967 by Hapshash & The Coloured Coat (Nigel Waymouth and Michael English). Designed and typeset by [email protected] Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Coydon CRO 4YY ISBN 978 1 78125 794 4 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page v acknowledgements MANY FRIENDS HAVE GIVEN ME support, encour- agement and advice. I owe a huge debt in particular to Lucy Bailey, who edited the final drafts with unerring eye and whose unsparing critiques improved it immeasurably. The book’s shape and scope are largely the result of advice from Melissa North and Pierre Hodgson, for which I am very grateful. After some early setbacks, Deborah Rogers’ belief and support gave me the energy to stick with it. A thoughtful response to the first draft from Rose Simpson made it clear what I needed to improve in the second. The musicians and colleagues without whom there would be no story to tell will, I trust, find their acknowledgements in the text that follows. 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page ix Saturday sun came early one morning In a sky so clear and blue Saturday sun came without warning So no one knew what to do. Saturday sun brought people and faces That didn’t seem much in their day But when I remembered those people and places They were really too good in their way. In their way In their way Saturday sun won’t come and see me today. Think about stories with reason and rhyme Circling through your brain. And think about people in their season and time Returning again and again And again And again And Saturday’s sun has turned to Sunday’s rain. So Sunday sat in the Saturday sun And wept for a day gone by. Nick Drake 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page xi foreword HANIF KUREISHI THE KIDS WHO DISCOVERED black music, sexual freedom, dissent and feminism in the 1960s are the people who have been running the West until recently. If anyone asks why we should continue to pay attention to what a bunch of hippies did during a period as idealised and mythologized as the 1960s, it is because the former heads have become the Headmasters running a failing school. Soon they will be entirely replaced. Perhaps, if we look hard enough, we will learn how the great corruption occurred and what has been lost. When it comes to music, Joe Boyd has lived through a good deal of the most lively and original stuff. His story is almost exemplary and he knows how to make it sound like a lot of fun, declaring early in White Bicycles that his ambition is not to be a star or even a singer, but a ‘record producer’. And, despite what appears to be a sweet and intelligent nature, he isn’t someone who can bear not to follow their passion. He was there. He made things happen. After some luck in avoiding the Vietnam draft, Boyd travels across America with forgotten, usually blind, black musicians, around the dangerous time of de-segregation. Then Bob Dylan fucks his girlfriend, and Boyd works at the 1965 Newport Jazz and Folk festivals, where Dylan plays xi 00 prelims - ch 10:00 prelims -10 05/06/2017 10:03 Page xii joe boyd ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ accompanied by Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield and the Butterfield Blues Band. Alan Lomax orders the sound to be turned down; Pete Seeger walks away, broken. Following this brilliantly described, almost pastoral episode, everything changes in music. Folk and white pop, now mixed with blues, give way to the rawer and weirder sounds of the experimental 1960s, and ‘protest’ music, in the 1970s, would turn into punk and the accurate prediction of ‘no future’. Soon there would be no more possibility or utopian ideas. Having moved to London, where he suspects the new action might be, Boyd gets involved with the UFO, one of the first ‘superclubs’, based in a former low-ceilinged ballroom in the Tottenham Court Road. The Pink Floyd were the house band. Boyd and his freaky friends put on Arthur Brown, The Move, and the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band. Hendrix, McCartney, and Christine Keeler all attended. When the club shifted to the Roundhouse, which was a bigger space, he was responsible for flying Arthur Brown, with his hair on fire, across the venue and over the amazed crowd. Boyd produced the Pink Floyd’s first single, ‘Arnold Layne’, written by the-soon-to-go-mad Syd Barrett, which got into the Top Twenty despite a BBC ban for ‘indecent lyrics’. But Boyd’s musical preferences were not really for psychedelia. ‘Why does England hate its own folk music?’ he asks. ‘In England, the mere thought of a Morris Dance team or an unaccompanied ballad singer sends more natives running for cover.’ Boyd went to some trouble to make the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention as significant for the public as they were for him.